22.09.15 - Quem engorda o porco é o olho do dono

Greetings from a brutally hot Sao Paulo - we could take no more on Sunday and joined a small army flocking to the supermarket in search of air conditioners and fans, so at least now we're relatively cool so long as we don't leave the house. Otherwise I spent most of last week getting my wedding trousers sorted out at a far-flung shopping centre (not a euphemism), and embarking on the long and extremely tedious road to completing my driving theory. 

I'm two lessons in and have already lost the huile d'olive: there's probably only about five hours worth of stuff you actually need to know for the test/real life, most of which can be read in the handbook you're given at the start, but for whatever reason they've padded this out into 40 hours, split into nine classes that HAVE to be attended consecutively (well, I've already missed one when we had friends over for stroganoff on Friday night, and will miss the last three as we're travelling next week, but I'll have to make it up next month). The first class was spent learning the various acronyms of state traffic organisms, and the second was spent looking at road signs. FOR FOUR HOURS. 

Our teacher, presumably all too aware of this grotesque, institutionalised time vacuum, tries his best to make things interesting - turning straightforward explanations of lorry customs lanes into rambling, imagined dialogues about papayas stuffed with cocaine, ranting about vehicle tax and putting extremely obvious matters of the highway code to a vote, just for the hell of it - but to no avail. Students fall asleep, car crashes in the road outside are unflinchingly incorporated into the evening's lesson, and we're all fingerprinted and thrown out at 11:10pm sharp, to take our chances with the droves of prostitutes walking the streets (until Gaby comes to pick me up, at least).

In other news, on Saturday night we went to THE big sertanejo concert of the year, at the São Paulo Sambadrome - for seven hours straight of grown men playing accordions, broken up by terrible, totally out-of-place EDM DJs and mobile phone ads, it was surprisingly tolerable, and it turns out most of the songs had seeped into my brain through heavy radio rotation so I was able to sing along and not be exposed as a sertanovice. The stage was pretty impressive (pics attached), plenty of stage invaders and confetti, and we watched the last set of the night from the disabled bay (with chairs!) after Gaby's friend made a fuss. Then it was back home via the 24-hour padaria next door for pizza and bed. Not quite Rock In Rio, going on just up the road, but rather fun nonetheless.

Otherwise work continues apace - Patrick wants to convey a letter to Lula, offering to help manage his party's PR omnishambles, so I'm on the trail of confidantes of his who have yet to be sent to jail or lose all credibility - and we're very much looking forward to heading up North to the Deep South at the weekend, wedding trousers and all. 

Finally, my titular saying of the week translates as "it's the eye of the owner which fattens the pig" - which depending on context means either "things only come good if you keep an eye on them", or "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" (which is much creepier, given recent news from Downing Street).

Right, I'm off to driving school again; maybe today we'll learn what roads are. Speak to you tomorrow!

Frod